Tag archives: word origins
Birds losing direction followed by weapon (9)
Never mind all those fancy games devised to get your brain working – if you want to keep mentally sharp and alert, and at the same time increase your vocabulary, it’s difficult to beat a good crossword. Whether you prefer concise, cryptic, or general knowledge versions, once you start completing a crossword, it can be [...]
I Mubarak, you Mubaraked, they were Mubaraking?
There have been a good number of comments tweeted and posted online over the past few weeks about the possibility of turning Mubarak, the name of the recently resigned Egyptian leader, into a verb. Some of the suggestions as to what it might mean are ‘to stick to something like glue’, ‘to refuse to leave’, [...]
Blurring the lines between fiction and reality
Have you ever been caught in a Catch-22 situation? Do you get the eerie feeling that Big Brother is watching you as you spy yet another CCTV camera filming your every move? Or perhaps you’re grinning like a Cheshire cat having just won another game of hangman on Oxford Dictionaries Online? The English language is [...]
How to write a slang dictionary
1. Cancel your appointments ‘Have you ever thought of writing a slang dictionary,’ an editor asked in 1993 and although I had, a decade earlier, and published it, I said only, ‘Yes.’ And had a publisher. The problem, in these globalizing days, is keeping them. There would be four before the book finally appeared. I [...]
Ancient roots—from acre to Zeus
What, a language quiz might ask, links acre as a name for a measure of land (recorded in Old English, and coming from Germanic) with the name of the Greek god Zeus? Or candy (with its Arabic ancestry) with pepper (coming to Europe via Greek)? The answer—all have related forms in Sanskrit—opens up a fascinating [...]
Body parts
The etymology of the English language is awash in body parts. We have hundreds of words that have been formed, Frankenstein-like, by taking bits and pieces of the human body. For instance, we have numerous words containing hands in them – chiropractic comes to English from the Greek root kheir (meaning hand), and the Latin word for [...]
Mandela, ubuntu, and the born frees of Mzansi
The peculiarities of South Africa’s political and economic heritage meant that in the twentieth century it bequeathed to English, among other things, a number of political terms that captured the mood of those troubled times. February sees two notable milestones, the twenty-first anniversaries of the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and of the [...]
Happy birthday, Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens, born just under 200 years ago on 7 February 1812, is one of the most quoted writers in English. In addition to quotations, such as ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …’ (A Tale of Two Cities), several colourful characters from his novels have permeated the English [...]
Blog categories
- Competitions and quizzes (26)
- Dictionaries and lexicography (115)
- English in use (303)
- Grammar and writing help (58)
- Interactive features (46)
- OED Appeals (4)
- Other languages (49)
- Varieties of English (28)
- Word origins (156)
- Word trends and new words (92)
